Business

KNICK’S NEW DRIVE TO ‘NET

Stephon Marbury hasn’t lost a step off his game.

Not basketball, mind you, where Marbury’s career hangs in limbo because of an ongoing dispute with the Knicks, but his business game centered around his low-price Starbury brand of sneakers and apparel.

Less than a week after Steve & Barry’s closed its last store, Marbury has opened Starbury.com, an e-commerce site in partnership with Amazon.com, and announced an expanded line-up of products including books, CDs, DVDs, fragrances and, in a deal announced this week, a line of apparel from hip-hop artist Bow Wow due this fall.

“I’m a department store,” Marbury told The Post, in describing how his lifestyle-brand site – still featuring low-priced items like $14.98 sneakers and $21.98 jeans – will house other brands and products.

“Steve & Barry’s is over, but I survived,” said Marbury, who inked an exclusive deal with the recently shuttered discounter in 2006.

Marbury said he hopes to add digital music and book downloads to the site next month and, over the next several years, add up to a half-dozen flagship brick-and-mortar stores. In addition, the 31-year-old point guard said he is looking to add budding entrepreneurs to his site.

“This is bigger than basketball, this is a chance to create change in people’s lives,” Marbury noted, saying the low-price model he set up for Starbury is especially on target in the current tough economic climate.

Under the terms of Marbury’s deal with Amazon, Starbury, a 12-person operation based in Durham, NC, pays the retail giant 7 percent of its revenue to cover fulfillment expenses.

For now, Starbury is not profitable and Marbury is financing it himself. The Coney Island native has cobbled together a five-, 10- and 15-year plan to expand the business and make it profitable, but he exhibits some of his on-court quickness to sidestep a question on when Starbury will move into the black.

“I don’t want to say but I’m alright,” he adds, noting that in another piece of his business he owns 13 income-producing buildings in Virginia, Dayton, Ohio, and Charlotte, NC, that are leased to the government.

“Being in Steve & Barry’s put me in 126 stores,” he said. “But now I have access to six million to seven million people a day who shop at Amazon.”